Travel Photography > Great Plains > Galveston Island

These notes continue from The Chapman Swifts and the Man from Galveston.

The man from Galveston is Jim Stevenson, who is being called a murderer. He is receiving death threats in emails. People are talking about him all across the country. Hundreds are expressing an interest in his demise. Many talk of shooting him in the head with a rifle and letting him suffer a horrible death.

I was shocked to read all of this, perhaps even horrified, because to me, Jim Stevenson is an American patriot.

In the same month as the swifts whir above the Chapman chimney, Stevenson aimed his rifle at a feral cat near Galveston's coastal sand dunes and shot it. He shot the cat - which he was allowed to do under Texas law. He did so, because the coastal dunes are home to the endangered Piping Plover, a shorebird whose numbers have been declining since the early 20th century.

Galveston is an island just south of Houston, Texas. Because of its position along the Gulf Coast - its unique geography, it is attractive to a number of North America's birds. In fact, Stevenson, founder and President of the Galveston Ornithological Society, also owns North America's curent record holding property for the 'yard list'; a hobby practiced by millions in the country. The yard list is a list of bird species seen on one's yard. 306 birds have been counted in his yard - that is almost half the total number of species in North America; making his locale extremely important for the country's biodiversity.

Stevenson teaches life sciences, conducts birding tours on the island, and consults on environmental issues. He had spent years trying to train cat owners and island residents about the importance of keeping their cats indoors, spaying and neutering them, and so forth. Feral house cats, which are efficient predators of birds and small mammals, are one of the most dangerous threats to avian biodiversity. In America, they kill millions of birds each year. That may sound innocent enough, until you look at the numbers. Some birds, like the piping plover, exist only in the thousands, in decreasingly isolated populations.

By attempting to keep feral cats off the beaches, Stevenson may have been contributing significantly to the species' survival. This may hard to believe, but a few weeks ago, my wife and I were at Corn Creek Station of the Desert National Wildlife Range, north of Las Vegas. We walked on a trail and found a small building in the wooded riparian area there.

This building was a sort of aquarium, with windows. If you looked carefully enough through the windows, you could see a handful of them, swimming among towers of algae and weeds.

If I wanted to end a species' existence on Earth, I could nearly do it right now. An axe would do it. I would take out most of the species' population, bringing its likelihood for survival that much more compromised.

At the same time, I could do a lot as an individual to make its survival more likely. I could donate a few thousand dollars, or volunteer in recovery efforts. Federal budgets for such species is minimal - Sometimes, a species is propped up by a handful of good samaritans.

A few details in Mr. Stevenson's shooting meant a very big trial for Galveston. A bridge toll booth operator claimed he had been feeding the cat. And the cat, which the toll booth operator had given a name, was not killed immediately by the bullet. She died on the way to the vet.